I once taught a class for an hour in which I said nothing that was not a question. At the end, my final question was, “What did I do today?” They said many versions of “You made us think”. Not once did anyone say, “Everything you said was a question.” I had to tell them. If someone had seen it, that would have required a knowledge of “meta-comminication”.
I am a behaviorist. A playwright must be a behaviorist. Drama focuses on action. Thought must be “outed”. Description must be detailed in the technicals. Theme, philosophy, meaning must be converted to the phenomena of character and plot, the dialog. The effect must convert a collection of individuals into a uniform behavioral outcome. The totality is an exhibit in the museum of human behavior. The recipe then gathers dust until its next incarnation.
We need to hear (take a deep breath): a good voice speaking in conflict with an adversary words that resonate great ideas set in poetic devices to make ideas memorable to an audience eager to hear what may transform them into better human beings through understanding of the ways of resolving life’s important conflicts. (Whew! I stuffed that trunk full!) The drama form serves that aim very well. And that is the province of rhetoric.
I am a behaviorist. As a teacher, I wrote goals for behavioral outcomes of learning experience. Ethics, speaking, writing, and listening are behavioral skills. (Write the last act first.) The meaning of life resides in what you “do” with it. (That’s in the Oly play.) I need to understand the grammar of everything. That is fundamental. For instance:
What is the fundamental math skill? For nearly everyone in everyday life, the foundation should be “probability”, or statistical reasoning. They do not teach that.
What is the fundamental history skill? They teach the facts of history without teaching how historical facts are generated. For nearly everyone, assigning the writing of a family history, picking the brains of the elders while they are still alive would teach the basis of history.
What is the most fundamental skill of all? It’s nutrition. We are all amateur eaters where we should be professional eaters. They do not teach that. And what’s the fundamental fitness skill? You answer that one. I say, be a self starter, with one principle in mind, discipline. And so it goes.
About learning. Give my mind a problem, and I have enjoyed, after some strenuous effort, some good outcomes. That’s fun. If it hurts, you are in the throes of learning. Learning is change, the destruction of old habits and creation or substitution of new ones. “Stop that!” is not constructive. “Do this!” is. Change destroys confidence. You are motivated to believe that the new level of behaving will improve on the old comfortable way of doing things. You experience what Gerald Heard called egression into a new state of consciousness. You have evolved in the only way that humans can evolve. Having learned gives satisfaction.
Here’s a basic communication skill. Since I love the drama form of entertainment, I love reading aloud with old fashioned, shameless bravura. (I can be had.) I don’t know if I am good or just another Florence Foster Jenkins. I would like to narrate an evening, Hallowe’en ballet program where I read Riley’s “Little Orphan Annie comes to our house to stay…”, Carroll’s Jabberwocky, Poe, and others.
The awareness of voice for the multitude is minimal to non-existent. (Except for extreme makeovers, in which the voice is being operated on to make it not incongruous with the youthful appearance.) The television and movie technologies have a retrograde effect through the electronically assisted voice when needed for the live, public voice for the stage. Body mikes? What the hell! What speaker at the rostrum would eschew the microphone? Not one. And do they know how to handle the mike? Most will stoop to it. Even actors at the awards ceremonies who depend on the boom man for that. Many actors have lost it for the stage. I taught voice and articulation. Actor’s voices are not as beautiful in quality nor as strong as they need to be. Loud, impassioned lines too often sound shouted, a high-pitched, strident, broken, cracking, rough screech. The tools, the instruments are not there any longer. “I am old, Father William.”
Anyone who appeals for common sense is an unthinking, non-deliberative fool. As if there is such a thing that is implied as the reigning mode of thought today. There is no “Judge of Common Sense” sitting on a bench in some court of common sense law.
Is the evidence for “common sense” its ubiquity? Then look around you. Jay Leno and the majority would look around and see that being overweight and obese is the ubiquitous rule. “Common sense” can be seen in the tv ads that drum up business for food and food servers that appeal to taste, not nutritional goodness. Common sense is the appeal for many things that can harm you.
Yes, we have senses in common, taste, touch, sight, hearing, smell. We have five internal senses which do not have any external point of reference, kinesthesis, balance, temperature, pressure and pain. Our individual experience of any of the ten senses at our command constitutes our perception of the world around us. However, there is a non-sensory component of our experience, which is the memory of experiences compiled in the mind, or brain. Perception, then, has sensory and non-sensory components. So much of our perception is outside of what we have in common. The phrase, “common sense” can only mean what we have generally agreed upon to govern our acts, the law. “Self-evident truths” is a phrase arising out of its historical period, reflecting the state of knowledge and “mind”, or the “Zeitgeist” of that period. Thomas Paine expressed it in his pamphlet, Common Sense, which guided the society at that time toward the nation that was created to our present day benefits.
Science is the place to find uncommon sense. Read the fine print on wrappers and containers after you have studied how to read such language and numbers. Bad health can be seen in many people who cannot or will not find the uncommon good sense to guide them through the mine fields of label warnings. Finding the will to read and study is uncommon sense. The evidence is in the ubiquity of the ignorance or the avoidance of the intelligence that should stand behind common sense.
There may be no common sense. We each must argue for our own behavior as it originates from our own sense of what is right and good in everything we do. Our authority for our acts should not be that everyone else is doing it. Everyone else will not be there to back us up if our acts are called into question by some officer of the public. YOYO.
If you are overweight or fat and you take comfort in your fat or overweigt friends in the good-eats club, you will still get diabetes on your own schedule and suffer with it alone. If your drinking pals lead you astray — “Aw come on, ole buddy, have another; we’re all going to get sloshed together. Drink up!” — at your common-sense party where you will stand out if you do not go along to get along (which can be the common-sense appeal), then that is the very time for “uncommon sense” to operate.
Common sense has many guises. Common sense is the bogus appeal of the unthinking. Only you can judge what your uncommon sense tells you. You cannot stop to reason out what is the “common sense” of any situation of choice. In all things, question and evaluate authority. Laws will tell you what is supposed to be a large part of the common sense. If you do not know the law, you are still its subject. Matters not controlled by law, dress, food, drink, friends, driving, and so on, leave much for your reasoning to do to find the uncommon sense of it.
Wherever they are, wherever and whenever they speak, their only economic policy pursuit: cut taxes! The past eight years. The next eight years. Then. Now. Forever. It’s monomaniacal (“mental derangement restricted to one idea”)!
Captain Ahab, in the great American novel, Moby Dick, or, The White Whale by Herman Melville, could not be deflected from his pursuit of the monster white whale. You know Ahab’s fate. The Republicans’ insistence on tax cuts is their Great White Whale. The Republicans are that deranged. Everything can be solved by tax cuts. Leave more money in society. Don’t take it out in taxes.
I heard Sen. Jim DeMint (Republican, Joint Economic Committee) say it. I expected it, as the discussion progressed on George Stephanopoulos’s Sunday morning program, and then I heard it. (Jim demented.) But Barney Franks sharply, convincingly rebutted DeMint. It wasn’t hard. Just plain, reasoned good sense.
This metaphor of Ahab, the monomaniac pursuing Moby Dick, to the destruction of his crew and ship and himself, perfectly expresses my assessment of our current economic crisis, its causes and its status.
It began with Reagan: “…government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” And he proceeded to emasculate government, to denigrate what is the hope of vast numbers of citizens for justice, safety, security, and all those promises in the Preamble to the Constitution. Reagan gave the self-serving among us that shibboleth of ultra conservatism, lapel-pin flags, trickle down economics, deregulation, union-busting, the values feint, and so on. What is so amazing is that the people who had most to lose from such policies lapped it up, voting against their own best interests. Ultimately, I see the Republicans as ugly creatures created by ignorant voters. I fault the citizens who lack intelligent discernment involving code words calling for acts that have consequences the gullible do not foresee.
That is the essence of “ideology”, Republican ideology, which favors ideas that have expressions that bear no relationship to the truth. You have to be smart to be a citizen in a democracy. The educational system was developed to be the guardian of the democratic process which is seated in government. The government system is not the problem. The establishment that takes charge of the government can be the only source of any problem. Reagan demagogued it and gave us his legacy of lies, swallowed whole by the type of people who wanted their own personal gain to prevail over the general welfare.
When people receive you into their houses for a party, do you enter and then leave without making to the hosts some nice, thoughtful comment on what you have observed about their entertaining grace?
Your hosts have probably made some preparations and formal adjustments to their home pertinent to the occasion of your visit. They probably have furnishings of interest for which they have some pride in showing, things that give them pleasure and may also be a source of pleasure to their visitors. There are some things present that may test your perspicacity and reveal to the hosts something about your good eye and the quality of your appreciation and tastes, about your background that justifies their self-congratulation for knowing you and inviting you.
Surely, what they have done in some special effort to entertain you warrants the simplest expression of gratitude at the least, without excessive gushing. Something you say to them may make your participation memorable, in a good feeling the hosts can take to bed after their exertions of the day.
Good party guests make comments to the host that show a general interest in the good things of living.
To enter and take everything the hosts offer and say nothing about the experience can and probably should be taken by the hosts as a low evaluation of the their efforts to entertain. If the feelings of the guests are negative, should they keep quiet rather than speak the truth? Is silence better than saying the negative? It is the responsibility of the guests to find the right words that communicate exactly what they feel about the evening.
If the hosts failure was absolutely perfect, that terrible fact should have become obvious to everyone who was there, probably including the party-givers. However, there just had to be at least one thing that was the saving grace of the evening and worthy of comment. The hosts will use each observation in their analysis of the party. Not one person should take for granted that the party was a success.
If there is a discrepancy between what the guests tell the hosts to their faces as they leave and what the guests say to each othet in the car going home, then there is a clear ethical problem in the guests’ self-concepts. For that, there is little to be done short of taking the course of treatment.
— at his news conferences. Upon receiving questions from the press about the Obama’s part in the Illinois governor’s wanting kickbacks for an appointment to fill Obama’s Senate seat, Pres-Elect Obama should say this:
“If you put that issue above the urgency of the questions about the economy, the war, the inadequacy of health care in this nation, among other more pressing problems, then I will ask you to stay after class — uh, uh — this news conference when I will gladly answer any and all questions on that issue, in a post-mortem irrelevant to me and the real issues before this nation. Simply, I have had nothing to do with “that one”, but whatever you need to ask I will give answers.
I have also added to my seating chart of the reporters at these news conferences a grade for the quality and topic of each question. My staff and I will confer on the assignment of that evaluative statement, and I will be guided by that chart in my taking of questions. Hollywood has its “A” list, “B” list, and so forth. So will we hold you accountable just as you hold us accountable. But the real important communication will take place in the Pre-Mortem.
Infant Industry #1
Have the manufacturers of American automobiles become “infant industries” that require protection against competition from China, Japan, Korea, Europe, or any others competing for sales in the U.S. whose product is not built using U.S. labor forces? In the Senate hearings, the import of cars from Korea was clearly perceived and cited as unfair competition at this time. Nations that exact high tarrifs on imports or exports or use other means such as quotas to gain a more favorable position in the U.S. market constitute unfair competition AT THIS PARTICULAR TIME OF THE RESTRUCTURING OF THE U.S. MANUFACTURING OF CARS. Does the present circumstance require protection legislation that favors our auto industry?
The history of the U.S. shows certain periods that had such protections. If it were to be instituted now, could it shield the auto industry for a certain length of time to be given to the re-tooling and restructuring of this business? Or is there an argument against such protection that would continue the competition as a better spur to the auto makers to drive them to their new goals?
I tend to believe that they should be held under the gun of competition because they have, for so many years, been unable to muster the vision of a new, greener world of independence from fossil fuel burning. They have ignored that competition. They have been reluctant for many years to innovate.
On the other hand, if they have put on the hair-shirts of a new ethic, sincerely committed now, well then–relief? They are getting the money from us. Is that enough? Should the money go hand in hand with the protections? Would OUR money invested be safer with their protection?
Infant Industry #2
Are we going “green”? That is certainly YES! Just now it’s all talk, getting ideas and making plans, but I just know it is coming. However, what nation will become competitive and own a large share of the market in “green” technology and manufacture the hardware that underlies wind, solar, geothermal, automotive, wave-action, biomass, and energy storage technology? The inception of this industry is upon us. I think it qualifies as an infant industry and the competition has been proceeding for some time now, but the automotive technology appears to have escaped from the U.S. and gone elsewhere.
This morning I said to my wife, “Wife!” I said, “Wife, is there anything about you I don’t like?” Then I said, “Wife, let me think. There must be something.”
I thought and thought.
“I can’t believe it, wife, that you are perfect. In spite of what everyone thinks about me, wife, I am not perfect.”
I thought hard for a while.
“Wife, there is one thing. When you make coffee, you crumple up the little paper coffee filter and put it aside. I always find it right where you left it on the counter, just a short reach one pace from the waste basket, and I throw it in, every day.”
No response.
“You just want me to feel wanted and needed. That must be it. I’ll never fail you, ever, wife.”
I guess there just isn’t one thing I don’t like about my wife. But I tried.
So the election season is over and the avalanche of issues to write about have disappeared.
Stop borrowing Reagan’s “trickle” metaphor. You are on the verge of getting your own, but you’ll have to take one more step!
This is a melting pot we live in. Look at the pot, where many disparate groups of identities are mixed in the stew of this society. Multifarious communities make up this society, and no one knows better than you. Where is the heat applied? At the bottom, of course. And what happens inside, at the bottom? Bubbles form. Bubbles of gas pop to the top. And what’s in the pot melds, bonds, joins, blends, merges, every ingredient contributing to the final product, the savory stew that is us, the U.S.
Now look at the “trickle” notion that branded Reagan’s economics. “Trickle” does not come from the bottom. “Trickle up”— NO! Trickle comes from up and moves by gravity down. It is an apt metaphor for those who see authority crushing down from the top onto the communities below. It’s authoritarian, totalitarian, fascistic. Despotic, undemocratic, repressive, tyrannical, demanding. An apt description of Republican approaches. Kill big government and substitute the unbearable weight of the economics of wealth crunching down on top of those middle and poverty classes below.
The blunt force trauma of wealth on the children of the wealthy can account for some of the problems of rich kids, but even more, if greed is good and greed gets goods, and that drive for wealth operates at the expense of the majority, then, yes, change we can believe in is needed, NOW! A new politics; a new economic policy.
No, Mr., → Prof., → Sen., → Pres.→ Obama, your life story bubbled up from the bottom of the pot, and you should be touting, not a borrowed metaphor (which doesn’t make sense), but your own brand of economics and democracy THAT BUBBLES UP FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE MELTING POT. It’s a simple but big change, stamping your own brand ® on economics and politics.
I HAVE PRES. OBAMA DOWN AS (to use a grammatical construction) ⇒ THE FUTURE-PERFECT PRESIDENT; he will be satisfied and happy next year at this time with what he will have done.
Please, somebody, get the message to him!
RETIRE JOHN McCAIN!
For the good of the United States of America, and for the good of John McCain, RETIRE JOHN McCAIN! Why? Please see my immediately preceding blog entry, in which I take up the topic of his age,
.
Barack Obama is being pilloried by Hillary Clinton and John McCain for making what was, in my estimation, essentially
a sociological assessment of small town life
in Pennsylvania. The statements he made were empirical observations, not loaded with the bad affect his opponents and gotcha journalists and commentators gave them.
Consider that there may not be a negative interpretation of what he said, which a rush to judgment by opponents has put out there.
Consider this: he is probably, almost certainly, more sensitive to race and gun issues in the U.S. than the white candidates (from our history). In his campaign trips around Pennsylvania, he obviously encountered something in the people he talked with that a bright, deliberative mind would be sensitive to, and something that a white woman candidate might miss. I believe he saw what could be termed a xenophobic provinciality—turned against him?— and he was cognizant of it, and reacted honestly to explain his special sensitivity. As President, such an awareness would mean that he could find some ways of confronting the special problem of small towns when government programs are implemented to assist them.
And Hillary’s (and John’s) opportunistic bent to cast what she can in the worst light for personal gain came to the fore. But any person who has an adequate critical mind should not be too quick to fall for the “feeding frenzy” of two opponents whose flip-floppery and opportunism may be suspect. Consider the source. Withhold judgment, in this case, until comprehension is complete.
I pulled my car up to a stop light behind a person whose license plate had the slogan, “Respect Life”. I had to think about that. Does that person, who paid a premium for that plate in order to display that sentiment to me as a command to me to respect life, himself or herself truly practice and obey that order? Does he swat flies, set traps for mice and squash a mosquito on his arm?
The personification of respect for life was Dr. Albert Schweizer. He spent a long time in a jungle in Africa ministering to the medical needs of native Africans. He suffered when stepping on an ant his “reverence for life” went to such lengths. And he wrote the book on it in his service.
Well, of course, I know what that sentiment refers to, the issue of abortion. But I had to think further about that license plate philosophy, and all bumper sticker beliefs, short, concise summaries of difficult issues. Rather convenient ways to think for the narrow minded, if the bearers test out in discussion to be short-sighted. I was just wondering.
I am a definition guy. That started at Northwestern University in graduate classes taught by Clarence T. Simon and Karl F. Robinson. Simon taught us to define in the philosophy of science, especially behavioral science, and Robinson taught us definition in pedagogical process. Both much revered.
Here is my feeling for an operational definition of the “caucus”. It is a meeting of like-minded people to discuss what they have in common. Now I am going to look it up in the dictionary.
Probably of Algonquian origin. (O-ho, a native American concept!) A conference of party or organization leaders (as legislators) to decide on policies, plans, appointees and candidates, etc. So, the native Americans had working, probably pure democracies?
My experience was not a good one as a model of democracy. There were too many people to have a “discussion”, as I define the term, NOT “conversation”. Ordinarily, there probably are fewer people, but it was our bad luck to have such an exciting political season. The leader said, to start, we will have only one minute for any comments. Several stood up and made speeches of very short duration to the large group, of whom I knew none living in my area, and they also seemed not to have connections to any supposed neighbors.
We had to have two counts on Obama and Clinton, one pre-“discussion” show of hands and one post-”discussion” stand-up-and-be-counted. Two had changed positions. That was it. I left thinking that could have been done by a ballot with hanging chads.
It was very cold and I had to park quite a distance from the school. I’m glad I went. The tribe is no longer a tribe but an overpopulated society which is a larger amalgamation of smaller communities of interest. Oh, if we only had a policy of NPG, and then ZPG! Someday it will be de rigueur .
When is day one? The day after the inauguration? There is no day-one. Not the kind meant by the oft-repeated phrase. Okay, do not take it literally. Then when is it? The first week is day-one? If there is a day-one, it means a general readiness to deal instantly with what drops out of the sky into your lap. No newly minted President could or should commit to an instant deal. We should hope that our new President has a deliberative mind with a process that is second nature (habit) to deliberate, and that process contains two words, experience with the mental habits of a history of applying a deliberative process, and judgement which is the result of decision making. The questioners should have been asking about the candidates’ process of making decisions, asking about their operational definition of deliberating and making decisions, personal exemplary cases of their problem solving techniques. I heard the governor of Colorado, before he was elected, give such an understanding, unasked, of how he would operate the levers of power.
I have never heard reporters ask such operational questions. That’s why I do not like the intrusive presence of journalists in the campaign and election process. They have a historical sense that adds to their value in reporting. But they have become managers of the agenda. I was extremely excited when, during the debates, a candidate would wrest control of the process from the inquisitors. YEAH! Reporters have been suspect for many things. There is the oft-raised question, where were the reporters when the question of going to war in Iraq was being proposed?
Day-one is a myth. Has no definitive value. But it has been a big question.
Judgment is the balancing of alternatives. Judgment becomes more difficult with the increasing number of alternatives. (The more candidates there were at the beginning increased the complexity of our choice. The two that remain have reduced the complexity to black or white. Uh…. yeah. Or, male or female. (Hmmm. It’s still very complex.)
Day-one is a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
Having watched the tv news shows with a moderator and panels mostly of journalists, we should hold as suspect this major source of information and analysis. Why suspect? Its depth of deliberative discussion is probably, from a journalistic perspective, not of the highest quality.
I do not know how many people watch such “talking heads” programs. If they have some impact on the outcome of the election of a president, then the analysis and discussion might be better if the moderators chose those panel members who have the depth of book-length expertise, those who can be seen on C-SPAN’s Book TV programs. Those author’s usually appear in solo performances. It might make better programs if the journalist-moderators put together those scholars in one session and had them interact for the benefit of the citizen-voters.
I did see on one presentation on C-SPAN an author who was the worst public speaker I have heard in a very long time. But his message is essential for understanding his topic, “Children of the Jihad”, and I looked beyond the verbal static and thunderstorm twister in his manner of presentation to get what he had to say. I did so because I had been thinking along the same lines. There was a good book behind him. So I guess a powerful message trumps delivery.
Most authors of serious non-fiction are not so “cursed” in the delivery area. They should become the panel members, they and other scholar-specialists, instead of, or in addition to the journalist-columnists.
For instance, Randall Robinson spoke on the story of “An Unbroken Agony” in his book of that title, Haiti and the kidnapping of Pres. Aristide by the U.S. Have you ever heard Randall Robinson? I did, just before I saw the speaker described above, back to back. In Randall Robinson I heard a speaker in the opposite extreme. I have seldom heard a speaker of such high quality, fluency, articulateness, intelligence, eloquence, erudition, wisdom, all in one person in the service of a story that should be taken to heart by all U.S. citizens. How much the Haitians did with so little in their revolution which was hi-jacked by France and the U.S. How the U.S. does so little with so much. You don’t tear upthe constitution and overturn the checkerboard if you don’t like the person you’ve got. You go from election to election until you do get the leader you want and should have.
After that action of the Bush administration, it is essential to ask, what does America (U.S.) know about democracy. Our acts in the world against democracies, like Haiti had, indicate that the answer to the question is “Nothing!”
President Ahmadinej[ih]ad spoke at a university forum, and I am amazed at the kinds of people who wanted to veto the event. People who should be ashamed to give evidence that they have no understanding of First Ammendment rights, whose fragile minds would shatter at hearing an opposing expression of a worlds-apart idea.
It rhymes with Petraeus. Clever, huh? Orange is a harder word to find a rhyme for. So a rhyme-driven ad must have an additional measure of power to persuade, eh? Was that an example of “high dugeon”? I think I finally found one! In the personally aggrieved politicos who call for censorship to save us from the hurly-burly of political campaign ads!!
I have written on this blog previously about defining democracy. Now I would add this discussion of the culture of democracy and its implications for democratizing Iraq.
Tom Brokaw: “Islamic rage, which we can’t completely understand.” (9-11-07)
Mr. Brokaw, there are answers for those wanting to understand Islamic rage. But like the long airy plunge of the cliff-divers, you must be sure you hit the deep flow of the swell, not the shallows of the ebb. The neuroscientists may have their instrumented, empirical answers, and the cognitive scientists may have their view of functional brain events and mental states, but as I believe, those modernist explanations should either be supplemented by, or yield to an explanation by examination of the ancient roots in the evolution of people coming into the functions of language, as studied by Julian Jaynes in the art and literature of ancient times.
Let’s take that plunge into the deep, for “by indirection shall we find direction out” (you know who).
Incipient human forms co-existed with advanced human forms. Modern humans were coexistent with pre-historic human types such as the Neanderthals. A vestige of encounters between the two is the appearance of ogres and giants in fairy tales and myths. At one time, it was inconceivable that a man could ride a horse, and when it so happened that there was a first intrepid and creative genius to conceive it and do it, a mental double-exposure in the brains of the first watchers caused the birth of the man-horse. The centaur myth of Greek (religious) legends became a natural part of tribal lore, a metaphor for generally heroic deeds. Alexander the Great was reported to have encountered on his return from India, by all appearances, stone age people living by the sea. The point is that similarity in human form cannot be generalized into similarity in experience.
Not all people experienced ancient Greek democracy. Not all people were in the dark in the dark ages. Not everyone on Earth felt the re-birth in the Renaissance. Not everybody was enlightened by the Enlightenment.
The mind of human beings can be other-directed, and that is what Julian Jaynes discovered and wanted us to know about ancient people, the time of the installation and the beginning of the self, the introcosm of ego, to me, a sort of mental free agency where we can tell ourselves what to do on nobody’s authority but our own, deliberated say-so. Previous to that time, people were not conscious in any way we are familiar with. They were pre-conscious with devinely ordered decision-making within the functioning of a bicameral mind. Metaphorically, “bicameral” refers to the nature of our deliberative, governmental bodies, the two houses of Congress, and that is the model of the brains of ancient people.
I believe that the tribalism that continues to exist in our time is made possible not by the inner-directed, not by the self-directed, but by the other-, or outer-directed mind, as Jaynes has described (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976).
In our high-tech, “modern” age, not everyone has a free-agent self, with a strong sense of agency, or volition, or self-authorization. Not everyone can claim to be the author of his or her own story. Such people have been deprived of, or helpless in taking control of their own lives. The authority for their behavior is embedded by tribal (religious) acculturation in the right hemisphere of the brain as the hallucinated voice of god-like powers.
At first, the remembered sayings of potentates that were the tribal leaders were the guides of what to do and when to do it. The pronouncements became functionally autonomous as the leaders themselves in time were forgotten, except as iconic statues. The left hemisphere still had language, but it was ordered by the voice hallucinated from the right.
The tribal unit persists today. From early in the first millenium, tribes have enculturated their population in the content of the Islamic culture.
We speak of a democracy for a tribal people, the Iraqi Muslims, who are divided into three, murderously opposed cultures. By definition, their tribal differences originate in the hallucinated voices they respond to, directing them in different pathways to achieve their salvation. The question is, do they have the culture to support democracy? If democracy requires a culture of deliberative, free agent minds, wherein the liberty is granted by the government to think freely, then any attempt to institute a democratic society will fail, and the culture will revert to the one kind of government that succeeded previously, that dictatorship which was instituted by Saddam Hussein.
What is the “Islamic rage” that we have experienced? The complexity of our Western civilization is overwhelming people who from long custom have led a different of life. There is no lexical base in their mind space for coping with the results of liberty. Yet, our President says that that part of the world is desperate for freedom an liberty, words that are a part of the lexicon of democracy. But those words have little meaning for the other-directed people of Islamic upbringing in the madrasah. We have seen the films of pupils in the madrasah memorizing the Koran and Islamic law and Muslim history. Madrasahs inculcate a hatred against Western civilization. Practices of severe corporal punishment are common in many Madrasahs in Pakistan and other countries.
Tension leads to anxiety, leading to the rage against that complexity threatening their basic beliefs induced by the lexicon of democracy being imposed. Superimpose our 231 years of experience on their few years since they lost their cultural shelter. Their young have been engulfed in the atomic fallout from a technological explosion of media freely available in cyberspace.
In my study of the nature of culture with a communication perspective, I arrived at this definition of culture: a culture is distinguished by the high degree in which the people share the codes of communication, lexicon, verbal codes, and nonverbal codes (discussed on my web site).
As one author says, the transition from Islamic religion to Islamism may be applied to the Christian religion becoming Christianism, a political ideology. (Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg)
Courage, I have learned, requires intestinal fortitude to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to the end of life. It is not cowardly quailing before a sea of troubles and not opposing and ending them. Now I carry that definition with me. Will it infect my behavior when the circumstance arises?
